Licht - Die Trilogie: Drei Romane

Author: M. John Harrison

With The Centauri Device, M. John Harrison provided the foundation text of the British Renaissance, or the New Space Opera, or both (depending on who you listen to). Then he turned to writing fantasy while writers as varied as Iain M. Banks and China MiÃƒÂ©ville built on that foundation. With the Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy, he returned to space opera with a work that took it to a whole new levelIn the first volume, Light, Michael Kearney is a serial killer in contemporary London who is also a theoretical physicist who is working with his partner on calculations that will eventually pave the way for humans to get into space. At one point their black and white cats seem to pass through the screen of their computer, and of the characters at the centre of the other two strands of the novel Seria Mau is associated with a white cat while Ed Chianese is associated with a black cat. These two strands take place 400 years in the future in a region of space known as the Kefahuchi Tract where all sorts of strange alien technology has washed up.The second volume, Nova Swing, takes place in Saudade City where an edge of the tract has touched down. The zone has a strange effect on the city, where people seem to appear as if from nowhere then fade away after a few days. Meanwhile some adventurers try to enter the zone for the mysterious technology to be found there, but at tremendous cost.Finally, in Empty Space, all of these strands come together with a story that again ricochets between the present and the future, or rather that collapses the differences between present and future. The Kefahuchi Tract is an extraordinary invention, but in the end we are left wondering how much of it simply exists within the minds of Harrison's characters.Light won the Tiptree Award and Nova Swing won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, yet in a sense winning science fiction awards is a curious thing, because the books destroy our expectations of science fiction and rebuild them as something else. They are complex, self-referent, full of puzzles that seem to mean something different every time you re-read the books. It's a work, in short, that makes you think and then makes you doubt what you're thinking.

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First of all, you do need to read The Centauri Device, an exercise in New Wave space opera, two science fictional forms that really shouldn't go together, but here they work perfectly. In a run-down future, John Truck is chased by a strange assortment of characters because he is the last Centauran and therefore the last person with the genetic make-up to arm the doomsday weapon of the title.

Then you need to read some of the myriad science fiction stories that Harrison drew on in his work, or that in turn drew on his fiction. For instance, The Centauri Device is clearly the inspiration for the Lazy Gun that is at the heart of Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks.

In Light, Seria Mau's body is broken and distorted and squeezed into a box in order for her to link directly to the controls of her ship, the White Cat. This is inspired by The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey, in which a person born with severe disabilities is encased within a shell and plugged in to a ship through which she lives.

Nova Swing contains a direct reference to Clans of the Alphane Moon by Philip K. Dick, in which the moon is a former psychiatric institute where the one-time patients live on, divided into clans according to their particular psychosis.